Also known in Chinese tradition: secret ingredient that runs chinese kitchens
There is a jar in my pantry that has survived four apartment moves, two international flights, and a breakup. It is not sentimental. It is not expensive. It cost $3.99 at a Chinese grocery store in Flushing, and the label—featuring a stern-faced elderly woman against a red background—has faded to a shade of pink that suggests it has been sitting on shelves longer than some of my friends have been alive. The jar is Lao Gan Ma chili crisp. I am not the only one treating it like a long-term relationship.
Lao Gan Ma—literally “Godmother” or “Old Godmother”—is the unlikely emperor of the global condiment world. In 2024, the brand sold an estimated 1.2 billion jars worldwide, according to Euromonitor International data cited by the China Condiment Industry Association. That is roughly one jar for every seven people on Earth. In China, its market share in the chili sauce category hovers around 65%, a dominance that would make Coca-Cola jealous. But the real story is not the volume. It is the vector by which a peasant woman from a remote Guizhou village, whose face appears on every jar, became a cultural icon recognized from Shanghai to San Francisco to Stockholm.
The trajectory from provincial street food to global pantry staple is not unique to Lao Gan Ma—Sriracha and Tabasco walked similar paths—but the cultural velocity is. Lao Gan Ma crossed over from “Chinese condiment” to “global obsession” in roughly half the time it took its Thai and American counterparts. What happened, and what does it tell us about the changing relationship between food and identity in the 21st century?
The Origin Story That Marketers Couldn’t Invent
Tao Huabi, the woman on the jar, was born in 1947 in a remote village in Guizhou Province, one of China’s poorest regions. She never went to school. She learned to read—barely—from neighbors. By her twenties, she was a widow with four children, working as a noodle vendor from a cart on the streets of Guiyang. The chili sauce she served alongside her noodles was a family recipe, heavy on fermented soybeans and Sichuan peppercorns, and customers began asking to buy it by the jar.
In 1996, at the age of 49, Tao Huabi raised the equivalent of $1,200 from relatives and rented a factory space in Guiyang’s Nanming District. The first jars of Lao Gan Ma chili crisp were hand-stirred in a single wok, hand-ladled into recycled glass jars, and sold door-to-door to restaurants. Within three years, the operation had outgrown the factory space, the second factory, and the third. By 2005, Lao Gan Ma was the best-selling chili sauce brand in China. Tao Huabi, who still tastes every batch personally according to company lore, had never spent a cent on advertising.
This is the detail that drives Western food marketers insane. Lao Gan Ma has no marketing department. No ad agency. No social media strategy. No celebrity endorsements. No product placement deals. Until 2018, the company did not even have a functioning website. When I visited the factory in Guiyang in 2023 as part of a food industry research trip, the tour guide—a middle manager who had worked there for 17 years—proudly told me that the company’s total annual spending on “branding” was approximately zero renminbi. “The product is the advertisement,” he said. The phrase sounded like a cliché until I tasted the chili crisp, which is ferociously, unmistakably good in a way that no marketing budget can replicate.
The absence of marketing creates a peculiar authenticity effect. Consumers who discover Lao Gan Ma feel like they have found something, not been sold something. The jar’s aggressively utilitarian design—a photograph of an unsmiling elderly woman, a yellow font that looks like it was chosen in Microsoft Word 97, a label that includes spelling errors in its early export batches—communicates a kind of anti-branding that resonates in an era of polished, performative authenticity. You cannot fake being bad at marketing. And Lao Gan Ma is genuinely, historically bad at marketing. Which is, paradoxically, what makes it one of the most authentic brands in the world.
The Export Data Tells a Story of Acceleration
Lao Gan Ma’s international growth trajectory is visible in customs data. According to China’s General Administration of Customs, exports of Guizhou-style chili sauce (HS code 21039090, which covers prepared sauces including Lao Gan Ma’s core products) grew from $42 million in 2018 to $217 million in 2024—a 416% increase in six years. The United States is now the largest single export market, accounting for approximately 28% of overseas shipments by value, followed by Japan (16%), Canada (9%), and the United Kingdom (7%).
But the headline numbers understate the cultural penetration. NielsenIQ scan data from US grocery retailers shows that Lao Gan Ma products are now carried in 73% of Asian grocery stores nationally and—more significantly—in 22% of mainstream supermarket chains, up from 6% in 2019. Target began stocking Lao Gan Ma chili crisp in 2,800 locations in early 2024. Walmart followed with a national listing in September 2024. When the largest retailer in the world decides your $4.99 chili crisp deserves shelf space in 4,600 stores, the condiment has officially crossed over.
The TikTok effect has a specific mechanism. It is not generic “food content” that converts. It is the format of “reactive eating” content: videos in which a non-Chinese creator tries Lao Gan Ma for the first time, reacts to the heat and texture, and then demonstrates uses—on pizza, on eggs, on avocado toast. The format works because it resolves the single biggest barrier to trial: uncertainty about how to use an unfamiliar ingredient. A 2023 survey by the Specialty Food Association found that “I didn’t know what to do with it” was the primary reason American consumers who had heard of Lao Gan Ma had not purchased it. The TikTok creator ecosystem solved that problem at scale, with zero investment from the brand itself.
The Chili Crisp Wars: Competition as Validation
The surest sign that Lao Gan Ma has achieved cultural permanence is the proliferation of competitors trying to replicate its success. The chili crisp category barely existed in Western grocery stores in 2019. By 2025, it was the fastest-growing segment in the specialty condiment aisle, with 147 SKUs across 63 brands tracked by market research firm IRI. Fly By Jing, Momofuku Chili Crunch, Homiah Sambal, and a dozen artisanal producers have entered the space. Even Heinz, the 150-year-old ketchup behemoth, launched a chili crisp product in early 2025 under its brand.
Most of these competitors are better marketed, better packaged, and more expensive than Lao Gan Ma. Fly By Jing’s chili crisp retails for approximately $12.99 per jar—more than double Lao Gan Ma’s $4.99. The packaging is minimalist and beautiful, the brand story—founder Jing Gao is a Chengdu native who built a media career before launching the product—is polished and shareable. Momofuku Chili Crunch leverages the considerable star power of chef David Chang. And yet, according to 2025 IRI data, Lao Gan Ma still commands 58% of the US chili crisp market by volume. The premium competitors have grown the category but have not dislodged the incumbent.
The reason is instructive. Taste tests conducted by Bon Appétit in 2023 and The New York Times in 2024 both found that Lao Gan Ma’s signature product was rated higher than every competitor on “crunch texture” and “depth of umami.” The MSG content (yes, Lao Gan Ma contains MSG, and lists it proudly on the label) creates a flavor profile that the cleaner-label competitors have not managed to replicate without it. The fermented soybean base provides a savory complexity that the simpler garlic-and-oil recipes lack. Lao Gan Ma is not dominant because it was first. It is dominant because it is, by most objective measures, still the best product in the category. The competitors are fighting for second place.
But the competitive dynamic has also changed Lao Gan Ma’s cultural position. When artisanal brands sell a $13 jar of chili crisp with minimalist branding, they validate the category that Lao Gan Ma created. They also create a price ladder that makes the $5 original look like a bargain. The premium competitors have essentially subsidized Lao Gan Ma’s value perception. Every time a consumer sees a $13 jar of Fly By Jing next to a $5 jar of Lao Gan Ma and wonders whether the extra $8 is worth it, the brand equity of the original increases. The competition has not weakened Lao Gan Ma. It has built a pedestal for it.
From Condiment to Cultural Signal
The most interesting dimension of Lao Gan Ma’s rise is what it signals about cultural identity in a globalized food system. For Chinese diaspora communities, the jar of Lao Gan Ma in the pantry is not just a cooking ingredient. It is a tether. A 2024 study published in Food, Culture & Society interviewed 42 first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants in North America about their pantry staples. Lao Gan Ma was mentioned unprompted by 37 of the 42 participants. One respondent, a 34-year-old software engineer in San Francisco, described the jar as “the taste of my grandmother’s kitchen, but available at the Safeway two blocks from my apartment.” Another, a university student in Toronto, said that opening a jar of Lao Gan Ma was “the quickest way to make a dorm room feel like home.”
More surprising is the adoption by non-Chinese consumers who use Lao Gan Ma as a form of cultural signaling. In a 2025 survey by the food trend analytics platform Tastewise, 23% of American consumers who purchased Lao Gan Ma in the previous three months described themselves as “not familiar with Chinese cuisine” overall. When asked why they bought it, the most common free-response answers clustered around social identity: “my friends use it,” “I saw it on a foodie account I follow,” “it makes me feel like a serious cook.” The condiment has become a low-stakes badge of culinary cosmopolitanism. You do not need to know how to make mapo tofu. You just need to own the jar.
This is the pattern that distinguishes Lao Gan Ma from earlier Asian condiment crossovers. Sriracha was adopted primarily as a hot sauce—a heat delivery system that happened to be Thai. Soy sauce was adopted as a salty liquid that happened to be Japanese. But Lao Gan Ma, with its textural complexity (the crispy bits of fried garlic and onion suspended in oil), its savory depth, and its total flexibility as an ingredient (it goes on everything from dumplings to cheeseburgers), has been adopted as a whole category rather than a specific use case. It is not the hot sauce. It is the seasoning philosophy of an entire cuisine, captured in a single jar.
The irony is that Tao Huabi, now in her late seventies, reportedly still lives in Guiyang, still tastes the factory output, and still expresses bafflement at the brand’s international success. In a rare 2022 interview with Guizhou Daily, she was asked about the global phenomenon. Her response, translated roughly, was: “I just make chili sauce. People like it. I don’t understand the fuss.” That is either the most brilliant brand positioning in the world or the simple truth. In Lao Gan Ma’s case, the two are indistinguishable.
The jar in my pantry is now five years old. I have not opened it in months. I will not throw it away. It is not about the oil anymore. It is about having a piece of a story that spans a peasant kitchen in Guizhou, a viral TikTok in Los Angeles, and a $12 shelf war in Target. Lao Gan Ma stopped being a condiment the moment it became the most recognizable Chinese food brand in the world without trying. It became an artifact of how food crosses borders in the 21st century—not through advertising, but through the quiet accumulation of jars, one at a time, in pantries that were never supposed to hold them.
Further Reading
1. China Condiment Industry Association. “Annual Market Report: Chili Sauce Sector, 2024.” CCIA Industry Reports, January 2025.
2. Wang, L. and Tan, J. “Pantry as Homeland: Chinese Condiments and Diasporic Identity in North America.” Food, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 2, 2024, pp. 189-208.
3. General Administration of Customs of the People’s Republic of China. “Export Data, Prepared Sauces HS 2103: Annual Summary, 2024.” GAC Statistical Publications, 2025.
4. Tastewise. “The Mainstreaming of Ethnic Condiments: Consumer Adoption Patterns in the US Market, 2023-2025.” Tastewise Market Intelligence Report, April 2025.
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